Articles

I’ve always felt I’m someone who could approach her own beheading with unvarnished resignation, no sprees of weeping or remorse; dressed, if I were lucky, in a murky red gown newly made by a servant who would miss me; if not, in a muslin shift worn fine and bleached by countless afternoons drying on mothy…

I like this moment when there is nothing more I need to do, when I have emptied everything on the counter— eggs, bread, apples, and some chocolate I will give my children after homework— and I am free to study the checkout lady’s red face ever so slightly gasping for air, the quick hands of…

He’s Isaiah sometimes, sometimes Elijah, or even the Son of Man, though no one on earth would ever see a prophet—much less a divinity— in Willie, back on probation, rumpled and stinking. His lank hair’s dyed a color not found in nature. His lips clamp a roll-your-own smoke gone cold. I’m a coward. I play…

He looks skyward and sees he forgot to snap off the lamp in his upstairs study. He’d call it aging, but aging is not, he tells himself, a downward slope. He hadn’t climbed to get here. His life isn’t a hill. It’s more like a long sleep, with tens of thousands of dreams, dreams of…

Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1927 Nothing automatic or newly modern here, nothing springs open to dispense a bowl of hot soup or a cool slice of pie in exchange for coins. But neither will a waiter intrude. The young woman sits alone, fashionably dressed and without expectation. Surely someone said he would meet her,…

The following lecture was originally delivered in London in October 2008, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Sandford St. Martin Trust, which promotes excellence in religious media programming in the U.K. It was later broadcast on BBC Radio. HISTORY HAS an annoying habit of sneaking up and mugging the certain and the convinced. In European…

Kayak on the quarry: will you hug the shore, push straight across, waver or dawdle? No paths on the water. Almost November, and the poison ivy is still green. The soft trap of sky closes all around. An artful little spray of leaves near the shore, as though Martha Stewart were sitting in for God.…

They had reasons to believe in God. Miracles helped. And their aftereffects must have lingered for a time, but then, the disciples needed to start walking again, one town to another, nothing in between but the hot, dusty road and a desert of sand and rock where not one thing required a moment’s appreciation. Just…

All he ever wanted was to disappear. But he kept coming upon himself as if he were a character in a story who, despite his best efforts to understand, remained inscrutable. How he tried to keep straight the difference between who the author said he was and who he thought he was. He told himself…

A Private Letter A Poet on Writing for Composers NOT LONG AGO, I was giving a reading with another poet who has written libretti for composers. I hadn’t heard anything of his musical collaborations for a few years, and asked him if he was still working in the opera world. “I’m doing something for television,”…